Lieutenant Dan Season

As a child of the ’90s I was deeply formed by the incredible film Forrest Gump. My youngest sister, who has Down’s syndrome, has a particular gift for watching any film over and over and over again, and somehow, perhaps unsurprisingly, she found Forrest Gump to be a character she could love and a film with plenty of compelling drama, a great soundtrack, and plenty of action for the rest of us.

While we had some reservations about the salty language, especially from Gary Sinise’s character and Gump’s commanding officer, “Lieutenant Dan,” the film was a nice break from a raft of Disney movies packaged in their pillowy clamshells. To this day, I wager I can hang with the dialogue of the film and just about every Disney film through the early Pixar films about as well as I know the Nicene Creed.

But we had to retire Gump from the VHS rotation and his faithful service that my sister would put him through, as Lieutenant Dan’s language crept into my sister’s vocabulary in the second grade. An evaluator from her school asked my sister “Who is that?” and pointed to my father (for whom my sister has all the love in the world). She then cheerily replied, “He’s a bastard!!” My parents looked at each other in horror.

Back to Disney films we went.

Still, Lieutenant Dan’s saltiness has always stuck with me. Dan was caustically angry as a man who had lost his legs and returned home rather than dying in battle like his ancestors had in every other American war. Forrest Gump had rescued him and nearly everyone else in his platoon from an ambush in combat. In the film, Forrest finds him in New York City, around this time of year.

In a parable of Lukan prodigal heft, Dan’s life in the city was all about chasing cheap pleasure. Squandering his VA check on booze and dissolute living, Dan evinces a thousand-yard stare among the confetti and noisemakers. He may as well be back in Vietnam given the distance between Gump’s innocent joy and his own psycho-spiritual reality.

I always found tremendous emotional resonance with the memes that circulate just before New Year’s Eve.

“If you start the film at a specific time on New Year’s Eve,” Instagram reminds me, “you too can celebrate the New Year with Lieutenant Dan.” 

As someone whose serotonin is almost exclusively store-bought these days, this picture nails it.

My therapist backs up the data with his own experience. It’s when everybody calls. He assures me that this is the season in which he hears from clients old and new. It’s an emotional low tide.

Having served for ten years as a priest, I see it too on the professional side.

Tempers are short, emotions run high, people feel broke and anxious, and there is a reliable uptick in the death and dying of parishioners or their family members. Don’t get me wrong, I love this work and being of service, but it sure can pile up fast.

Dan’s visage in this bar scene evokes the same kind of steely glare through which many of us greet the new year. The joy of Advent’s anticipation is supplanted by wilting poinsettias and a whole lot of hard work to clear the backlog of all the things that were put on pause until after the holiday.

The next time we see Lieutenant Dan, he’s in the bayou, joining Gump’s shrimping venture. During a devastating hurricane, Dan hoists himself into the crow’s nest and yells at God — full-throated, furious, and unfiltered. It’s one of my favorite prayer scenes in all of cinema. Like a mashup of Job, Moses, and Leonard Cohen, Dan’s encounter with the Almighty is raw honesty. No polish. No platitudes. Just a guy yelling at God.

As a pastor, I love this image. I use it all the time with people as I try to I counsel them away from a gauzy, polite indifference in prayer. All the raging Dan did about the foiled plan to die in battle points to the same truth Nightbirde pointed toward with her life-changing “God is on the Bathroom Floor” description of prayer. A cranky neighbor in a downstairs apartment banging on the ceiling to jostle the attention of the heavenly neighbor that is God above.

Yelling at God feels unthinkable to many. Yet I can often sense the anger and grief simmering just beneath the surface — white knuckles, clenched jaws. I tell them: this is exactly what prayer is for.

Better out than in, otherwise it hardens like plaque in the arteries of the soul. The opposite of love isn’t hate, after all. It’s indifference.

This is the season of Lieutenant Dan. A time when it’s okay to feel low, to let your hair down. A season where you too can yell at God from the best perch you’ve got — whether it’s a shrimping trawler or the car or the bathroom floor. Let it rip. God can take it.

God doesn’t need our best, most polished, most optimized selves. We can rail against the injustices of the world and the incompleteness of our plans, our disappointment, our rage at the tyranny of finitude, and God can take it. Better yet, God can transform it.

Amidst the crush of annual reports, budgets, funerals, taxes, and holiday bills to pay, this working priest is embracing Lieutenant Dan Season. Soldiering on toward the reality of a God whose greatest love is to join us in our weakness and transform it. And so, as therapists book clients old and new, as the gyms swell, and everyone seems to want to circle back on all the business of the previous year, remember this.

It’s a great day to yell at God. Or, perhaps better put by St. Augustine: We sing our alleluias here in hope, while those who sing with us in heaven sing in hope’s fulfillment. Here we sing as wayfarers, there as citizens of our home country.[1]

In short, we sing and shout and curse and keep going. From Advent to Christmas through Epiphany, where the light of its star leads us to the Christ in the cradle, the Christ of the cross, the light of the world. Happy New Year, alleluia, and a blessed Lieutenant Dan Season to all who celebrate.

[1] Norris, Kathleen. ​Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith. R​iverhead Books, p. 367–368.